What We’re Reading: Tony Judt, Joan Didion, Hilary Mantel, and More

Notes from the New Yorker staff on their literary engagements of the week.

I recently finished “Thinking the Twentieth Century” by the Yale historian Timothy Snyder and the late Tony Judt, who was a New York University professor and historian of modern Europe. The book unfolds as a conversation between Judt and Snyder about the ideas and intellectuals that shaped and destroyed the previous century. “Thinking” took the form that it did because Judt was suffering from A.L.S., also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which was progressively destroying his nervous system even as his mind, as any reader of the book can see, remained as sharp as a laser beam. Judt died in 2010, not long after the book was finished.

“Thinking the Twentieth Century” is an incredibly stimulating read. It moves across the whole landscape of the recent past: the rise and fall of Communism and Fascism; Stalin’s show trials and the forced division of Europe; the black hole of the Holocaust. The century’s orchestrators—the men and women who made the ideas that made the history—step to the fore and then away: Not just Hitler and Stalin, but people like Sartre and Shaw and Zola and Zweig.

Still, for all of that, Judt and Snyder are most compelling toward the end, when they are talking not about the twentieth century but about the twenty-first. Judt may have been a historian but he was also a ferocious and prolific commentator on current affairs, writing mostly for The New York Review of Books. He was an unabashed proponent of social democracy, of states that are humane and egalitarian and tough enough to contain capitalism’s most flagrant injustices.

But what I found most refreshing about Judt and Synder’s case was the notion that economic questions should naturally be subordinated to political ones. This sounds pretty simple, but the truth is that these days, America’s political conversation is dominated by economics—what things cost, whether we can afford them, whether this or that outcome will spur or hinder economic growth. As such, our public debates often lurch toward a kind of determinism, which necessarily limits our choices. What Judt, under Snyder’s questioning, reminds us, is that this was not always the case, and it doesn’t need to be now. Instead of asking whether we can afford something, the proper questions should be: What is it that we value? What kind of society do we want? How can we pay for it?

Judt says it best:

I think we really are the victims of a discursive shift, since the late 1970s, toward economics. Intellectuals don’t ask if something is right or wrong, but whether a policy is efficient or inefficient. They don’t ask if a measure is good or bad, but whether or not it improves productivity. The reason they do this is not necessarily because they are uninterested in society, but because they have come to assume, rather uncritically, that the point of economic policy is to generate resources. Until you’ve generated resources, goes the refrain, there’s no point in having a conversation about distributing them. This, it seems to me, comes close to a sort of soft blackmail….

Though Judt and Snyder are calling for a more morally informed public discourse—one that moves beyond dollars an interest rates—they remind us that many of those who devised the welfare state in the nineteenth century were thinking just as much on prudential grounds. Capitalism is a great engine, capable of producing great riches, but left alone it will produce inequalities so extreme that it will ultimately self-destruct. “How do you stop capitalism from creating an angry, impoverished resentful lower class that becomes a source of division or decline?,” Judt poses.

The answer was social democracy—in American terms, a safety net—that tamed capitalism’s wildest extremes. Judt may have been talking about the nineteenth century, but he was reminding us that these questions are just as relevant today.

I read most of “Thinking the Twentieth Century” in Afghanistan, embedded with the U.S. Army. More specifically, I read the bulk of the book on one long, back-breaking drive, over the lunar terrain of Paktika Province. (In fourteen hours we traveled about twenty miles.) I sat in a vehicle known as an M.R.A.P., which stands for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected. It’s an enormous beast of a truck—it weighs fourteen tons—and is designed to protect soldiers from I.E.D.s and mines. An M.R.A.P. uncomfortably sits four. They cost about a half million dollars each. Just saying.

—Dexter Filkins

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself on a family vacation in Miami. Having never been to there, and feeling generally ignorant, I’d taken a silly stab at cultural immersion before I left by watching “Scarface” and by reacquainting myself with the “Buena Vista Social Club” soundtrack. I’d also Googled books set in Miami, to read while there. An opinionated friend suggested that my approach was the exact wrong one; I should read something “cold and northern” while in Miami, he said, such as “Independent People” by Halldór Laxness, a five-hundred-page novel about the life of a sheep farmer on a remote Icelandic croft. But, just as my grandmother used to wear red on Valentine’s Day and yellow on Easter, I plunged right into the spirit of things, and I discovered, among the thrillers and crime novels, an essay collection by Joan Didion called “Miami.” Bingo! It was out of print; I went to the Strand; they had one copy, in hardcover, and there I was.

I have read Didion on vacation before, and believe me when I tell you that “The Year of Magical Thinking” makes for a sombre few hours in a hammock. “Miami,” published in 1987, is serious business of a different kind—a historical, tropical noir. It begins:

Havana vanities come to dust in Miami. On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.

It goes on to tell the story of Cuban exiles in Miami, detailing the ways in which events such as the Bay of Pigs and the Mariel boatlift shaped the life of the city in the twentieth century. By the pool, as tourist-friendly lite reggae played on speakers hidden in the foliage, I had a hard time, at first, making my way through Didion’s long, elegant sentences and focussing on who was who and who did what. But then my family and I went exploring. We went to South Beach, where we looked at the Art Deco hotels (a bit haunted by my memory of the chainsaw scene in “Scarface”); we ate dinner near the Cuban-American rapper Pitbull and his entourage, whom my stepmother recognized and I did not; we cruised along the Dolphin Expressway; we visited the Everglades, Vizcaya, and Little Havana..

The more I saw and understood the more I wondered about, and my reading and our adventuring began to cohere. Didion lays out her subjects’ histories so clearly and deliberately, and in such calmly scorching detail, that by the time I read her account of a writer for the Spanish-language paper La Réplica having a chair broken over his head in 1974 at the Versailles, the iconic Cuban restaurant in Little Havana, I understood why his use of the word “politically” in reference to bringing down the Castro regime had been incendiary enough to make such violence seem inevitable. And, having eaten there (the steamed-vegetable plate is better than you’d expect), I could even picture the gilded chandeliers and mirrored ceilings above.

For the sake of this trip, I can conclude that the Grammy Larson jump-in-with-both-feet approach was the right one. But I’m planning a visit to Los Angeles, and maybe I’ll bring Laxness there to try the other tack.

—Sarah Larson

Normally I’m a one-book-at-a-time guy, but lately I’ve been multi-reading. Right now I’m reading:

“Bring Up the Bodies,” the new Hilary Mantel novel, as I very much enjoyed the first, and am a longtime Tudor junkie, starting with “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” on “Masterpiece Theatre,” back in 1970, when I was ten—although I can’t get into the idiotic new series, which is vulgar without being fun. Another reason I wanted to get to the Mantel sooner rather than later is that I’m writing a piece for the magazine about my long epistolary relationship with Mary Renault, certainly one of the great practitioners of historical fiction (hers were about ancient Greece), who was a long-distance mentor for me in the nineteen-seventies until her death, in 1983. So I’ve been thinking a lot about historical fiction as a genre—it’s often been seen as a kind of lesser form of the novel, often unjustly—and Mantel’s book is sharpening my thoughts on this subject. I’d emphasize, however, that while these Tudor books are likeliest to be Mantel’s most popular, a book that is much more characteristic of her marvellous, totally idiosyncratic work is the amazing “Beyond Black,” one of the best, strangest novels to come along in years.

Wesley Stace’s “Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer”: I’m loving this complex and very successful novel, which weaves together, in just the rich and twisty way I like, a murder plot with some very sophisticated material about music and modernity.

I’ve embarked, finally, on Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Gray Falcon,” her immense narrative about Yugoslavia, as a kind of group reading project with two writer friends. I’ve just begun it, and already I’m in love; it’s the kind of many-headed nonfiction narrative that I especially relish, combining travel, history, and memoir. (She places herself in the narrative in a very interesting way from the start: the desire to write about the South Balkans, she tells us, springs from an oddly personal moment, when she’s listening to the radio during a stay in the hospital; a news report triggers her thoughts about violence and history, and it just keeps going from there.) I only recently finished listening to Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” on tape (!), and so have been yearning for a giant, thousand-page historical work to fill the gap. I’m a happy fellow now.

—Daniel Mendelsohn

Photograph of Tony Judt by Gina LeVay/Redux.

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